China and the Olympics are generating lots of news stories; but one on Marketplace at American Public Media caught my ear this morning. Commentator Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute was talking up  a recent working paper (warning - pdf file) by University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis.

    With the headline Trade With China Gets The Gold, Wilkinson summarized their findings as showing that trade with China has been a net benefit for the poor and not so good for the rich.

  Follow me below the fold to find out why it sucks to be rich - and look at some signs that the GOP Class War on America is heating up.

How would you live if the price of bread tripled over night, every night?  Or if the cost of a simple shovel doubled in the time it took you to get from the bank to the hardware store?  It won't be easy and the experience of other countries with hyperinflation could provide a valuable warning about our policies here in the USofA.

Accounting standards define hyperinflation as any rate of inflation that exceeds 100% over a 3 year period or roughly 26% per year.  26% sounds bad, but hyperinflation is rarely that gentle.  At its worst, prices in Weimar Germany would double every other day.

What is life like when inflation is running at 11,000%, 2,500,000% or even 15,000,000%?  Zimbabwean writer Rejoice Ngwenya describes the horrifying effects in this interview.

The bush administration is trying to muddy the waters about Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki's quotes in Der Spiegel that he supports Barak Obama's 16-month timetable for a withdrawal of US troops from his country.  Despite claims of "translation errors," even Fox News made Iraq's position clear:

July 8, 2008 AP Report
Iraq Insists on Withdrawal Timetable for U.S. Troops
Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces.
The comments.. were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. They came a day after Iraq's prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal.  President Bush has said he opposes a timetable. The White House said Monday it did not believe Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals.

Social Darwininism reared its head last night on PBS' News Hour in the person of John McCain mouthpiece and free-market zombie, Nancy Pfotenhauer. Poor Pfotenhauer seemed oddly out of place in the realtively genteel world of PBS as she sputtered through an economic discussion with Gwen Ifill and Obama Campaign economic advisor Jared Bernstein. Through much head shaking and wide-eyed expressions of disbelief, Pfotenhauer sought to turn aside any talk of corporate responsibility or progressive governance as she distilled the McCain position: you're on your own in the ruthless world of all against all. Indeed, this McCain shill for laissez-faire economics seemed fairly boggled at the thought that anyone could credibly argue that more tax cuts, more deregulation, and more market-based government might not be in the best interests of everyday Americans out there in the heartland.

In this we should not be particularly surprised, for Pfotenhauer is not an economist. Rather, she is in the business of political public relations. Pfotenhauer is just another conservative lobbyist with a "brand" to peddle. Like Bush, McCain and his advisors seem to believe that economic policy is little more than a marketing strategy driven by a few catchy phrases. So who is she and why should we care?

Cato Institute "energy expert" Jerry Taylor took on electric vehicles yesterday trying to prove that fuel costs for vehicles with electric engines is greater than fuel costs for gasoline engines.  In the end, however, all Taylor proved was that there's not much "think" in this "tank"... more after the fold...

Updated:

Patrick J. Michaels must have what none of the rest of us posess: a crystal ball.  Just hours before the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize, Michaels "broke" the yet unverified news that Al Gore had won in an unflattering article attacking the former vice-president.  Any reputable news outlet would have waited until the news actually happened before posting the story.  That's basic journalism.  Instead, Michaels has tried to hijack the excitement of a potential Gore win by directing early traffic to his juvenile hit piece.

Al Gore has finally won his Nobel Prize, reminiscent of the proverbial little nut that stood his ground, evolving into a giant Oak. Now we can only hope that he runs for President, an office that, given recent history, surely deserves him.

Gore represents a party gone global warming ga-ga, with some of the world's goofiest environmental legislation in history awaiting a Bush veto and a Gore signature.

Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

Original post below the fold ...

In the Washington Post there is an article that shows the likelihood of protectionist retaliation is gaining steam.

Let's cut to the chase, despite all the enticing rhetoric that such noble-sounding measures conjure up, it's bad policy, bad for trade relations with China, bad for the American economy, bad for consumers, bad for the poor and lower classes and a bad precedent for global trade climate. The last thing we need is a domino effect of protectionism.

Sen. Schumer is once again at the heart of this debate and is pushing the same bad policies that many in the party along with some in the GOP are likely to support.

In the past, such news would be simple table pounding laced with nice sounding rhetoric and a photo op. Now it may have teeth and those are going to come right back and bite us in the ass.

The recent debacle of Alberto Gonzales testifying before Congress just illustrates the lengths to which the Bush Administration will go to protect it’s newly gained fascist powers. Daniel Schorr had it right in his NPR Commentary yesterday (7-30-07), Selective 'Leaks' from the Bush Administration, when he said:

In an investigation of a major leak the first question asked is, "who benefited?"

Who benefitted, indeed...

The CEO that said that his privately-owned company will publicly offer shares "literally over my dead body" can get the last laugh as Rex Tillerson, the new Chief at Exxon, is getting all the flack these days for being... well, the leader of "ExxonMob", the number one cited corporate culprit of the global warming epidemic in media history. And rightly so - with their beyond-repent past, Exxon can't help but have its foot strategically placed near its mouth.

And that privately owned company? It's Koch Industries and its history of founding (anti?)think tanks and strategic funding of institutes makes its path uncannily similar to the path taken by its public counterpart, Exxon.

A DeSmogBlog Dispatch

Map of Botched Paramilitary Police Raids

The Map Key includes:

Unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people

A recently released Gallup poll revealed that [gasp] people on the street are ignoring scientific evidence in favor of age-old beliefs and traditions.  DailyKos's own thereisnospoon characterizes the level of belief in Biblical Creationism amongst the Republican electorate as "scary," and goes so far as to say that we "cannot allow" these people to determine our leadership based on their "willful ignorance" of current scientific consensus on the issue of evolution.

I found it hard to summon up much concern over the poll.  What didn't destroy me yesterday ain't going to destroy me today.  It would seem to me that if the success of a democratic republic depended on a scientifically oriented, non-superstitious citizenry, this Republic would never have survived for 200+ years.  The fact is, education is spotty, learning is imperfect, people are on average...average, and biases are passed on from generation to generation like so much dinner china.  And so it goes.

[This was originally posted at Liberal Values, which frequently looks at the cross section between liberalism and libertarianism.]

The New York Times reviews Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. The review has met objections from many libertarians, and a discussion of their objections can be found at Cato-at-Liberty. I have not read the book yet and therefore cannot comment on some aspects of this disagreement, but I found it interesting enough to point out. There are also some aspects which could be commented upon based upon these articles.

Markos Moulitsas has written a very powerful and very moving piece on the sad subject of resurgent mindless violence in Central America.

Violence Begets Violence
by Kos

This story is a departure from this site's standard fare, but has hit me pretty hard.

El Salvador and Guatemala are currently gripped by the murder of three Salvadoran parliament members. They were en route to Guatemala City for a monthly session of the Central American parliament when their vehicle disappeared. Their bodies were found a day later, shot execution-style and burned nearly beyond recognition...

He goes on to describe the horrific history from the 1980s.

Here is the problem: this bloody truth flies in the face of the big myth of so-called Libertarian Republicanism which Kos, himself, indulged only last Fall.  

After Exxon Mobil recently reported record profits for any U.S. corporation ever, Cato Institute top economist Chris Edwards tried to explain to us how we will all benefit from Exxon's good fortune. Unfortunately, his claims just don't match up with the facts, as a simple check of Exxon's quarterly statement will demonstrate... after the fold...

The other day I was Googling for some information on transfats – and came up with the expected hits from the USFDA, academics, and the American Heart Association:
http://www.fda.gov/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...

http://www.umm.edu/...

http://www.americanheart.org/...
But I also found this from Faux News:
http://www.foxnews.com/...

"TRANS FAT LAWSUIT AGAINST KFC BASED ON THIN SCIENCE"

.....

Got my annual Social Security statement in the mail today. It is full of typical libertarian pro-privatization lies, presented not as opinions but as facts. This is no surprise, as Bush has done his best to fill up the top ranks of the Social Security Administration with libertarian extremists from the CATO Institute (such as Andrew Biggs), which first hatched the Social Security Privatization scheme in the early 1980's. CATO also hired Jose Pinera, the Pinochet flunky who worked for that bloody tyrant in dismantling the retirement system that was in place in Chile.

Why is it that self-described "economy expert" neocon lackey authors like Thomas Sowell and Irwin Stelzer somehow never get around to addressing the war as a giant drain on America's economy and resources?  Ever?

Who Gives A Shit?

Paul Jacob had a thought while taking a shit the other day. I apologize for the frank nature of the language here, but given the pettifoggery and mendacity usually evinced by Jacob's allegedly self-written weekly column cum radio spot "Common Sense," some plain speaking ought to be welcomed, even if it means calling a spade a spade, or, in this case, a turd a turd.

Who is Paul Jacob? you might ask. Good question. Howie Rich's brother-in-law is heard on "over 100 stations" every week on his commentary spot produced by "Americans for Limited Government*" (Howard Rich, President)